There has been an explosion of litigation in recent years related to the potentially life-threatening effects of social media usage among adolescents. Hundreds of cases have been filed in state and federal courts, many of which have been consolidated into multidistrict litigations or otherwise consolidated within state court departments. One such example in California state court is, in which the court recently overruled Snap’s demurrer on claims that Snap’s conduct in designing and implementing its social media platform, Snapchat, resulted in the foreseeable deaths of plaintiffs’ children, who overdosed on fentanyl.

Litigations involving social media can be complex and highly technical. Such cases often involve collecting and analyzing large amounts of data from social media websites and apps. This can present challenges for the lawyers and judges involved, as they may not be familiar with social media platforms and managing the unique types of data generated and stored on these platforms. Engaging a discovery special master can help streamline discovery in social media litigations to ensure that the right data is collected as efficiently as possible.

Social media repositories present unique issues for the discovery process. For instance, the repositories that hold a user’s social media data are controlled by a third party (e.g., Meta, X, Snap, etc.). Obtaining a user’s data typically requires the user to download their information using the application at issue. However, this download will only capture a snapshot of the user’s data at the time of the download. This means that any subsequent changes to a user’s social media data that occur after the download would not be captured by this snapshot.